The Architecture of Mystery

I became the youngest Master Mason in Russia — and from that follows something directly relevant to the subject of this book.

Lodge of the Muses No. 33, Petersburg.

The Lodge of the Muses was founded by Ivan Yelagin in 1772, having received its patent from the Grand Lodge of England. Yelagin was a courtier of Catherine the Great, director of the imperial theaters, the man who copied the empress’s manuscripts in his own hand (all of Catherine’s literary works have come down to us in his handwriting), and at the same time the first Provincial Grand Master of Russia: fourteen lodges, four hundred officials, meetings on Yelagin Island — the same one where Rossi’s palace and park now stand.

The Lodge of the Muses was the first in the Russian registry, under number one (in the English, the three hundred and third), and operated for half a century, until Alexander I’s decree of 1822 closed all Masonic lodges in the empire and put it to sleep for a hundred and eighty-eight years.

It was woken up in 2010: Grand Lodge of Russia, Orient of Saint Petersburg, number 33. We had the original patent of 1772 in our hands, the text of which survived in Pekarsky’s archives. Two hundred and thirty-eight years between Yelagin and us.

Petersburg is a Masonic city, and I mean this in the most direct, builder’s sense: Yelagin Island, the Kazan Cathedral (built by the Mason Voronikhin), the Hermitage Theater — all of it is architecture into which symbols are sewn. Suvorov, according to archival records, visited the Königsberg lodge “Zu den drei Kronen” in January 1761 under the cover of intelligence work rather than spiritual quest (the Petersburg “Three Stars” to which he is usually assigned, as Lopatin established, never existed). Kutuzov was a Mason (the lodge “Three Keys” in Regensburg, order name “Evergreen Laurel”). Novikov was a Mason until Catherine confiscated four hundred and sixty-one print runs of his books. The city was built by people who believed that architecture is a language, and that a properly built building changes whoever enters it — and into one such building, not chosen by me and not at once, I in the end walked, in my early twenties.

It happened, as always: someone knew someone who knew someone — nodes recruit nodes. You don’t find a Masonic lodge, it finds you; or, more precisely, the network in which the two of you are both nodes creates the connection at the moment of parameter alignment, like a recommendation algorithm captioned “you might be interested in” — only instead of YouTube there stands behind that algorithm an organization with a patent from 1772.

I was in my early twenties. Cocky, curious, and absolutely certain I’d crack the “mysteries of the cosmos” in a couple of months. Spoiler: I didn’t — but I saw something I hadn’t expected.